


we got here the hard way

by froggoo



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, PLEASE DONT TAKE THESE TAGS LIGHTLY, Panic Attacks, Prescription Medication, References to Drugs, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:35:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28107129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/froggoo/pseuds/froggoo
Summary: oh. is that what this is? is it a mental breakdown? finally, he has a name for the awful, awful feeling in his head and his gut and the roof of his mouth and his hands. his hands. what an odd place to feel a mental breakdown.he gives himself a moment. counts down from thirty-seven. it’s a very specific number, but he can’t think of any other number more suitable. thirty-seven.
Relationships: Boo Seungkwan & Choi Seungcheol | S.Coups, Boo Seungkwan & Lee Seokmin | DK
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	we got here the hard way

**Author's Note:**

> please, PLEASE read the tags.

“seungkwan.”

his hand shakes violently as he searches through the packed medicine cabinet, picking up one little orange bottle and reading the label and putting it down and picking up another and reading the label and putting it down and picking up another and—

“ _seungkwan_.” 

one of the bottles, containing just two little green-and-white capsules, falls to the counter. he picks it up and reads the label before putting it back. it tips over on the shelf, rattling. 

“seungkwan! please, you’re scaring me.”

“where is it? am i stupid?” he thinks aloud, pushing past over-the-counters and vitamin supplements and little orange bottles he’d already looked at. a hand catches his wrist. he looks up at seokmin, whose pretty eyes are wide with worry and threatening him with tears.

seungkwan can’t look at him for more than a second. his eyes fall back to the counter, cold and unforgiving. _i shouldn’t have stopped taking it. it’s too late, right? it isn’t going to help. what could help me, now? adderall? where can i get adderall? who would have that, and who would be awake that i could buy it from?_

it isn’t until he looks up at seokmin again that he realizes his freudian slip, that he’s been muttering all of this aloud. seokmin’s cheeks are wet with two tear tracks, his mouth opening and closing as he struggles to find words to say.

“don’t,” seungkwan tells him, and shakes seokmin’s hand from his wrist. he stands on his toes to reach the last shelf and pulls down one more bottle, promising himself that _if this isn’t it, i’m giving up_. he reads the label. vyvanse, 30 mg. it isn’t the dosage he’d last been on, nowhere near the strongest, but he figures he can take two and almost get there. he shakes it, more an unintentional tic than a purposeful movement, and opens the cap. only one pill falls out onto his hand, striking an imposing silhouette in ivory and orange. he takes it dry, then tips the bottle over on the counter. it’s empty, anyway. 

“fuck. _fuck_ , what am i gonna do? i can’t do anything with that much. it’s—it’s—fuck.” he threads his fingers through his hair and pulls, then drops them. two strands of hair, brittle, stick to his clammy palms. he clenches his jaw when he feels them, then rubs his hands together and shakes them and rubs them together and squeezes them so he feels his fingernails making little crescent-shaped indents. 

seokmin picks up the little orange bottle from the counter and reads the label. he puts the cap back onto it. it takes him two tries to fit it on right. “what can i do?” he whispers. his voice is shaking. he’s scared, and seungkwan hates that he’s the one who scared him. sometimes it doesn’t seem like seokmin’s the older one, especially not when he looks so much like a frightened puppy.

seungkwan stands back on his toes and keeps looking through the cabinet, desperate. he pulls down a bottle of zinc supplements and takes one, struggling to swallow it down with his mouth so dry. seokmin takes the bottle from him and sets it back down, then moves as if he’s about to touch seungkwan’s arm. seungkwan jerks away, his back hitting the wall. the bathroom is too small and he can’t seem to catch his breath. “don’t _touch me_ ,” he says, sliding down until he’s sitting on the floor. he eyes seokmin warily. 

seokmin hesitates, them uses the sleeve of the hoodie he slept in—that he had _intended_ to sleep in—to wipe his face dry. “i’m getting someone else,” he whispers. seungkwan furrows his brows as he stares, lost in thought, at the drawers across from him. usually, seokmin can handle his mood swings. what could possibly be different this time?

he’s mentally going down a list of people who would—well, he can’t remember whether the list was of people who would sell him drugs or people who would be sad if he kills himself—when seungcheol comes in and sits down next to him, two feet of empty space between their shoulders. he hadn’t noticed seokmin leaving. 

seungcheol doesn’t say anything, just stares at the drawers too. this makes seungkwan angry, for some reason. _no,_ he scolds himself, _this is a communal bathroom. those are anyone’s drawers to stare at_. 

“ _what_?” he spits out. it feels wrong on his tongue, too mean. he tries again, softer. “what?” it still sounds nasty, awful. he feels like a horrible person. 

“seokmin mentioned you were muttering something about adderall,” seungcheol says. his voice is uncharacteristically soft. seungkwan feels worse. 

“why? have you got some?”

“no.” seungcheol straightens his legs, or as straight as he can get them in the limited space. his feet, clad in socks with little elephants on them, press against the bottom drawer, his knees bent. “let’s talk it out first, and if you still think you need it, i’ll get some for you. i know a guy.”

“who?” seungkwan, suddenly all too aware of the walls pressing in, hugs his knees to his chest.

seungcheol looks at him and smiles. actually _smiles_. “let’s talk it out. why are you on the bathroom floor?” _audacity_ is the word that comes to seungkwan’s mind. the _audacity_ that seungcheol has, governing his pattern of thought. 

fighting the urge to run, seungkwan furrows his brows and looks at the tiles. “i don’t remember how i got here,” he says, honest. seungcheol nods. 

“felt that. i had my first mental breakdown on the bathroom floor, too. something about liminal space, huh?”

“i don’t know what that means.”

“that’s okay. it’s, like, a between. someplace that doesn’t feel quite like reality. a place of transition, i think. don’t quote me.”

seungkwan scratches his ankle. “just feels like the floor, to me. cold.”

with a subtle lift of his eyebrow, seungcheol shrugs. “sure. did you choose to be here?”

it takes seungkwan a minute to formulate an answer to that. “do you mean physically, or in an introspective way? did any of us choose to be here?” he says. he isn’t sure his wording is quite right. that’s what he gets for trying to be deep. 

seungcheol just laughs. or, rather, he lets out a little puff of air from his nose and lifts the edges of his mouth in what could be called a grin. “i suppose you’ve got a point there. i meant physically, though.”

“no. just sort of…happened.” seungkwan swallows, then swallows again to pay closer attention to the little _click_ that his throat makes in his ears. “i was looking for my vyvanse.”

“right. you said you stopped taking it a few months ago. you didn’t like it.”

“didn’t like how it made me act. didn’t like how i’d been on it so long i didn’t know who i am, really.”

seungcheol nods and pauses to see if he’ll keep talking. “and you said you could stay focused without it, if you had something to do with your hands. what happens when you don’t have something to do with your hands?”

seungkwan shuts his eyes. it took him years to be able to admit his problems out loud, but he’s known seungcheol longer than the problems have been around. “i pull out my hair. i don’t wanna talk about this,” he says, then opens his eyes again. his hands clench on his knees. they feel surprisingly warm under his palms, which are freezing. he sticks his fingers behind his knees to put some feeling back into them.

“that’s okay.” seungcheol’s toes wiggle against the drawer. he adjusts the position of his back against the wall. he looks uncomfortable. seungkwan’s uncomfortable. “what do you wanna talk about? what do you want to do?”

seungkwan takes a deep breath. it’s less shaky than it was before. “i don’t know. i—don’t know.”

seungcheol doesn’t say anything, lets him think it over. seungkwan is grateful for how seungcheol always seems to know when someone needs that. 

what _does_ he want? he wants to be able to do things, and do them effectively without the cold sense of dread and unwillingness washing over him. he wants to stop having to depend on medication so he can have an actual sense of self, but that’s an unrealistic goal. he wants to get off the damn bathroom floor. he wants to call his therapist. he wants to talk to his mom, but she would be asleep and she would be so painfully kind and wouldn’t help at all.

he wants—he wants to go to sleep. he wants his bed. he wants to be warm, and to succeed, and for his hands to stop shaking, and to make people laugh, and to be loved. 

but what does he want to talk about?

he needs to make a joke, to ease the tension. he hopes he isn’t the only one of them who feels it. 

what he needs, though, is different to what he wants. does he just _think_ he needs to make a joke? does he need to break the tension in the room, or the tension inside himself? what does he really need? what does he really need?

he wants to go to sleep.

he says so.

seungcheol nods. “makes sense. it’s one in the morning.” he doesn’t say anything else, waiting for seungkwan to finish thinking. 

“i want to take a break,” he says, and it’s a bit surprising. he _does_ want to take a break, but from what? from thought? from work? from the bathroom floor? from the conversation? 

“we can talk to the company, in the morning,” seungcheol suggests, and of course he’d know all about that, wouldn’t he. he knows better than anyone what it’s like to need a break, how to get one. 

seungkwan represses a shiver. he removes his fingers from behind his knees and instead puts them between his thighs, then moves them to underneath his arms. nothing is comfortable. 

“i want to get out of here. it’s cold. my hands are starting to hurt.” 

seungcheol nods again. “now?”

seungkwan pauses. “not yet.”

“if we’re staying here because you want your hands to hurt, that’s not a good reason.”

“no, i…” he shivers. “liminal space. it’s better here than out there.” 

with a smile, seungcheol nods again. he sure seems to do that an awful lot. “got it,” he says, then pulls his feet down off the drawer where they rest, tucking them underneath himself. “you want some chocolate?”

“what?” the question takes seungkwan aback. he wasn’t expecting it. especially not on a bathroom floor. 

seungcheol leans forward and opens the cabinet underneath the sink. he grabs something from the back. “i stashed some here a few months ago when i was going through it. thought i’d find myself here more often.”

seungkwan furrows his brows, then shakes his head. that seems like a gross idea. seungcheol puts the chocolate back. seungkwan will have to store that memory away for later. maybe someday he’ll be able to make a joke out of it, being offered chocolate on the bathroom floor during a mental breakdown. 

is that what this is? is it a mental breakdown? finally, he has a name for the awful, awful feeling in his head and his gut and the roof of his mouth and his hands. his _hands_. what an odd place to feel a mental breakdown.

he gives himself a moment. counts down from thirty-seven. it’s a very specific number, but he can’t think of any other number more suitable. thirty-seven. 

when he was seventeen years old, he gave himself twenty years into the future to have his life together before he was going to kill himself. a very unhealthy thing to think, his medication doctor told him, because he hadn’t had the guts to tell his therapist anything that really mattered yet. it had been years since he actively _wanted_ to kill himself, now, but the number still held him accountable. it was a reminder. _boo seungkwan was here_ , it said. _boo seungkwan once thought of this number and decided, “yes, that’s enough for me.”_

it had taken five years, four manic suicidal episodes, three prescription anti-depressants, and two therapists to talk himself down from that edge. but he’s better now, and that’s what matters. he’s not all the way better, but that’s the goal. 

he pictures himself by the river, like his current therapist tells him. falling cherry blossom petals, floating away in the current, are his thoughts. he pictures himself jumping in the river, and being swept out to sea. it isn’t as pleasant of a mental image as it once was. he pictures himself on land again, watching the petals drifting. it’s much nicer. 

“i think,” he says, flexing his fingers as he returns to the bathroom floor, “i want to get up now.”

“i don’t have to ask anyone for adderall, do i?” seungcheol asks.

seungkwan shakes his head. “no. i don’t know what i was thinking.”

“you were panicking. it’s okay.”

“tomorrow,” he starts, then hesitates. seungcheol waits. “tomorrow, i want to talk to the company. i want to take a break. you’ll come with me?”

“i’ll be next to you as long as you need me,” seungcheol says.

he takes a deep breath, funneling air down to the bottom of his lungs, and pulls himself upright. 

he’s far from okay. but he’s getting better. 

**Author's Note:**

> here is a list of mental health resources. do not takes these lightly. please, please, please get help if you need it. reach out.
> 
> i wrote this at 3 in the morning in the middle of realizing that i'd been having a mental breakdown for months. it is extremely personal to me, based on my own experiences and thought processes. i wish i had a seungcheol to help me get through it. guys, take your mental health seriously. 
> 
> i love you all.


End file.
